The Tortured Politics Behind the Persian Gulf Crisis

The splintering of the powerful Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) into warring
camps – with Qatar, supported by Turkey and Iran, on one side, and Saudi Arabia,
Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), supported by Egypt, on the other
– has less to do with disagreements over foreign policy and religion than with
internal political and economic developments in the Middle East.

The ostensible rationale the GCC gave on June 4 for breaking relations with
Qatar and placing the tiny country under a blockade is that Doha is aiding “terrorist”
organizations. The real reasons are considerably more complex, particularly
among the major players.

Middle East journalist Patrick Cockburn once described the Syrian civil war
as a three-dimensional chess game with five players and no rules. In the case
of the Qatar crisis, the players have doubled and abandoned the symmetry of
the chessboard for go, mahjong, and bridge.

Saudi Insecurities

Tensions among members of the GCC are longstanding. In the case of Qatar, they
date back to 1995, when the father of the current ruler, Emir Tamim Al Thani,
shoved his own father out of power. According Simon
Henderson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Saudi Arabia
and the UAE “regarded the family coup as a dangerous precedent to Gulf
ruling families” and tried to organize a counter coup. The coup was exposed,
however, and called off.

Riyadh is demanding that Qatar sever relations with Iran – an improbable outcome
given that the two countries share a natural gas field in the Persian Gulf –
and end Doha’s cozy ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, if there’s
any entity in the Middle East that the Saudis hate – and fear – more than Iran,
it’s the Brotherhood. Riyadh was instrumental in the 2013 overthrow of
the Brotherhood government in Egypt and has allied itself with the
Israelis to marginalize Hamas, the Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood
that dominates Gaza.

But fault lines in the GCC don’t run only between Saudi Arabia, the UAE,
and Qatar. Oman,
at the Gulf’s mouth, has always marched to its own drummer, maintaining close
ties with Saudi Arabia’s regional nemesis, Iran, and refusing to go along with
Riyadh’s war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Kuwait has also balked at Saudi
dominance of the GCC, has refused to join the blockade against Doha, and is
trying to play mediator in the current crisis.

The siege of Qatar was launched shortly after Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi
Arabia, when the Saudis put on a show for the U.S. president that was over the
top even by the monarchy’s standards. Wooed with massive billboards and garish
sword dances, Trump soaked up the Saudi’s view of the Middle East, attacked
Iran as a supporter of terrorism, and apparently green-lighted the blockade
of Qatar. He even tried to take credit
for it.

Saudi Arabia, backed by Bahrain, Egypt, and the UAE, along with a cast of minor
players, made 13 demands on Doha that it could only meet by abandoning its sovereignty.
They range from the impossible (end all contacts with Iran) to the improbable
(close
a Turkish military base there) to the unlikely (dismantle the popular and
lucrative media giant, Al Jazeera). The “terrorists” Doha is accused
of supporting are the Brotherhood, which the Saudis and the Egyptians consider
a terrorist organization, an opinion not shared by the US or the European Union.

On the surface this is about Sunni Saudi Arabia vs. Shiite Iran. But while
religious differences do play an important role in recruiting and motivating
some of the players, this isn’t a battle over a schism in Islam. Most
importantly, it’s not about “terrorism,” since many of the
countries involved are up to their elbows in supporting extremist organizations.
Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s reactionary Wahhabi interpretation of Islam is the root
ideology for groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and all the parties
are backing a variety of extremists in Syria and Libya’s civil wars.

The attack on Qatar is part of Saudi Arabia’s aggressive new foreign policy
that is being led by Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman.
As Saudi Arabia’s “monarch in waiting,” Mohammed has launched
a disastrous war in Yemen that’s killed more than 10,000 civilians and
sparked a countrywide cholera epidemic there – and which is draining at
least $700
million a month from Saudi Arabia’s treasury. Given the depressed price
for oil and a growing population – 70 percent of which is under 30 and
much of it unemployed
– it’s not a cost the monarchy can continue to sustain, especially
with the Saudi economy falling into recession.

Underlying the Saudis’ newfound aggression is fear. First, fear that
the kind of Islamic governance modeled by the Muslim Brotherhood, which has
elsewhere embraced elections and the democratic process, poses a threat to the
absolutism of the Gulf monarchs. Fear that Iran’s nuclear pact with the US,
the EU, and the UN is allowing Tehran to break out of its economic isolation
and turn itself into a rival power center in the Middle East. And fear that
anything but a united front by the GCC – led by Riyadh – will encourage
the House of Saud’s internal and external critics.

Who’s Really Isolated?

So far, the attempt to blockade Qatar has been more an annoyance than a serious
threat to Doha. Turkey and Iran are pouring supplies into Qatar, and the Turks
are deploying up to 1,000 troops at a base near the capital. There are also
some 10,000 US troops at Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, Washington’s largest base
in the Middle East and one central to the war on the Islamic State in Syria
and Iraq. Any invasion aimed at overthrowing the Qatar regime risks a clash
with Turkey and the US

While Egypt is part of the anti-Qatari alliance – the Egyptians are angry at
Doha for not supporting Cairo’s side in the Libyan civil war, and the Egyptian
regime also hates the Brotherhood – it is hardly an enthusiastic ally. Saudi
Arabia keeps Egypt’s economy afloat, and so long as the Riyadh keeps writing
checks, Cairo is on board. But Egypt is keeping the Yemen war at arm’s length
– it flat out refused to contribute troops and is not comfortable with Saudi
Arabia’s version of Islam. Cairo is currently in a nasty fight with its own
Wahhabist-inspired extremists. Egypt also maintains diplomatic relations with
Iran.

Besides the UAE, the other Saud allies don’t count for much in this fight.
Sudan will send troops – if Riyadh pays for them – but not very many. Bahrain
is on board, but only because the Saudi and UAE armies are sitting on local
Shiite opposition in the tiny Gulf island. Yemen and Libya are part of the anti-Qatar
alliance, but both are essentially failed states. And while the Maldives, another
member, is a nice place to vacation, it doesn’t have a lot of weight to throw
around.

On the other hand, longtime Saudi ally Pakistan
has made it clear it’s not part of this blockade, nor will it break with
Qatar or downgrade relations with Iran. When Riyadh asked for Pakistani troops
in Yemen, the national parliament voted unanimously to have nothing to do with
Riyadh’s jihad on the poorest country in the Middle East.

The largely Muslim nations of Malaysia
and Indonesia are also maintaining relations with Qatar, and Saudi ally
Morocco
offered to send food to Doha. In brief, it’s not clear who’s more
isolated here.

While President Trump supports the Saudis, his Defense Department and State
Department are working to resolve the crisis. US Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson just finished a trip to the Gulf in an effort to end the blockade,
and the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee is threatening to hold up arms
sales to Riyadh unless the dispute is resolved. The latter is no minor threat.
Saudi Arabia would have serious difficulties carrying out the war in Yemen without
US weaponry.

In Qatar’s Corner

And the reverse of the coin? Doha’s allies have a variety of agendas, not all
of which mesh.

Iran has working, but hardly warm, relations with Qatar. Both countries need
to cooperate to exploit the South Pars gas field, and Tehran appreciated that
Doha was always a reluctant member of the anti-Iran coalition, telling the US
it could not use Qatari
bases to attack Iran.

Iran is certainly interested in anything that divides the GCC. The Iranians
would also like Qatar to invest in upgrading Iran’s energy industry, and maybe
cutting them in on the $177 billion in construction projects that Doha is lining
up in preparation for hosting the 2022 World Cup Games. Also, some 30,000 Iranians
live in Qatar.

Figuring out Turkey these days can reduce one to reading tea leaves.

On one hand, Ankara’s support for Qatar seems obvious. Qatar backs the Brotherhood,
and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party is
a Turkish variety of the Brotherhood, albeit one focused more on power than
ideology. Erdogan was a strong supporter of the Egyptian Brotherhood and relations
between Cairo and Ankara went into a deep freeze when Egypt’s military overthrew
the Islamist organization’s elected Egyptian president.

Qatar is also an important source of finances for Ankara, whose fragile
economy needs every bit of help it can get. Turkey’s large construction
industry would like to land some of the multi-billion construction contracts
the World Cup games will generate. Turkish construction
projects in Qatar already amount to $13.7 billion.

On the other hand, Turkey is also trying to woo Saudi Arabia and other Gulf
monarchies for their investments. Erdogan even joined in the GCC’s attacks on
Iran last spring, accusing Tehran of “Persian
nationalist expansion,” a comment that distressed Turkey’s business
community. As the sanctions on Iran ease, Turkish firms see that country’s big,
well-educated population as a potential gold mine.

The Turkish President has since turned down the anti-Iran rhetoric, and Ankara
and Tehran have been consulting over the Qatar crisis. The first supportive
phone call Erdogan took during the attempted coup last year was from Qatar’s
emir, and the prickly Turkish President hasn’t forgotten that some
other GCC members were silent for several days. Erdogan recently suggested that
the UAE had a hand in the coup.

Is this personal for Turkey’s president? No, but Erdogan is the Middle East
leader who most resembles Donald Trump: He shoots from the hip and holds grudges.
The difference is that he’s far smarter and better informed than the US
president and knows when to cut his losses.

His apology to the Russians after shooting down one of their fighter-bombers
is a case in point. Erdogan first threatened Moscow with war, but eventually
trotted off to St. Petersburg, hat in hand, to make nice with Russian President
Vladimir Putin. And after hinting that the Americans were behind the 2016 coup,
he recently
met with Tillerson in Istanbul to smooth things out. Turkey recognizes that
it will need Moscow and Washington to settle the war in Syria.

The Russians have been carefully
neutral, consulted with Turkey and Iran, and have called on all parties
to peacefully resolve their differences.

The Risks of Doubling Down

There isn’t likely to be a quick end to the Qatar crisis, because Saudi
Arabia keeps doubling down on one disastrous foreign policy decision after another,
including breaking up the Arab world’s only viable economic bloc. But there
are developments in the region that may eventually force Riyadh to back off.

The Syrian war looks like it’s headed for a solution, although the outcome
is anything but certain. The Yemen war has reached crisis proportions –
the UN describes it as the number one human emergency on the globe – and
pressure is growing for the US and Britain to wind down their support for the
Saudi-led alliance. And Iran is slowly but steadily reclaiming its role as a
leading force in the Middle East and Central Asia.

There is much that could go wrong. There could be a disastrous war
with Iran, currently being pushed by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and neoconservatives
in the US Or Russia, the US, and Turkey could fall out over Syria. The Middle
East is an easy place to get into trouble. But if there are dangers, so too
are there possibilities, and from those spring hope.

Author: Conn Hallinan

There is the last days also for the imamo-noble rule. Arabs are people; people abhor, resent or envy ‘clero-noble rule; Arabs will yearn for a rule of the people.

Mark Thomason

This is a useful summary.

This mentions that “Oman, at the Gulf’s mouth, has always marched to its own drummer.”

I’d add that Oman is more than a recent Western creation. It was independent and a major power in the region back in the 1700’s when Britain and France were fighting over control of India. It maintained a Western style navy including ships of the line, and made money the same way it does today, by its independent control of trade routes in the area.

Oman may not have petro-dollars, but its independence and influence is well established.